ABSTRACT
Over the past 40 years there has been an ever-increasing concentration by pedologists on soil taxonomy, with the main aim being to classify soils, in the form of profiles, for a range of pragmatic purposes. Meanwhile, the understanding of soils in the sense of how they have been formed - i.e. pedogenesis - has become neglected and submerged in an ever more precise morphological system and its associated sea of neologisms. The concept of soil zonalism has dominated pedology throughout the twentieth century and, although its origin can be traced back to Russian scientists of the late nineteenth century, it has been through the United States Department of Agriculture, especially C. F. Marbut and his successors, that the greatest impact has been made. Despite the fact that erosion and deposition were treated very differently in the Nikiforoff and Butler schemes, pedogenesis was treated in exactly the same way, in that it was restricted to vertically operating processes in both cases.
